From the community documentation:
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto Automatically validates or exports schema DDL to the database when the SessionFactory is created. With create-drop, the database schema will be dropped when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly.
e.g. validate | update | create | create-drop
So the list of possible options are,
validate: validate the schema, makes no changes to the database.
update: update the schema.
create: creates the schema, destroying previous data.
create-drop: drop the schema at the end of the session.

So you got this killer Java web app you are developing, or you are deploying some super cool off the shelf application, and you decide to use some sort of SSL Accelerator to offload your HTTPS traffic, and it looks something like this: Only things aren't going so well. Maybe all the generated URLs for…